FBI calls on codebreakers to decipher murder notes

In June 1999, the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick was found in a field near St Louis, Missouri. Police found few clues, except for two encrypted notes in his trouser pockets, thought to have been written by McCormick himself. Ever since, these messages have withstood attempts to decipher them using the FBI’s standard techniques, which include statistical analysis to learn which characters appear most frequently. Now the bureau is asking for help.

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“We have our theories, but we’d like to hear other people’s theories,” says Dan Olson, chief of the bureau’s cryptanalysis and racketeering records unit.

“We’ve got the Kryptos group working on it,” says Elonka Dunin, co-leader of an online group dedicated to cracking the code engraved in the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture. Jim Gillogly, a Calfornia-based computer scientist and the first person to publicly solve the first three parts of Kryptos, has also tried his hand at the McCormick code, but admits, “I haven’t had any thoughts that the FBI wouldn’t have come up with.”

Fresh look

Olson wouldn’t say which approaches the bureau cryptanalysts have tried already, saying he wants a fresh perspective from the public.

“Anyone at all could spot something on these papers,” says Chet Richards, president of the American Cryptogram Association, a group for codebreaking hobbyists. “It may require more imagination than cryptanalytic training.”

The FBI has set up a website to collect solution submissions and tips about the case.